The two anonymous plagiarism cops at Our Bad Media, whose reporting resulted in the firing of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson last month, have published a new list of plagiarism charges, this time aimed at Fareed Zakaria and three news outlets that publish his work: CNN, Time Magazine, and The Washington Post.
In April of 2012, Zakaria was accused of plagiarism and subsequently suspended by Time and CNN, the two outlets that published the piece in question. Blaming research notes for the confusion, Zakaria would eventually apologize to Jill Lepore and admit that he had “made a terrible mistake” lifting paragraphs from her New Yorker piece.
During the suspension, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and CNN assured everyone that an exhaustive review of Zakaria’s previous work would be done to ensure this was an isolated mishap. Eventually all three cleared Zakaria and he returned to regular work (including his role as host of a weekly CNN show).
The anonymous plagiarism cops at Our Bad Media claim to have found 12 more instances of Zakeeria lifting the work of others without attribution — and all of the instances would have fallen under the Time, CNN, and Washington Post investigations.
The claim is that, among others, Zakeeria plagiarized from The New York Times, Bloomberg, Vanity Fair, Forbes, and Wikipedia. The examples range from Zakaria lifting full paragraphs to a single sentence to facts and figures produced by the research of others.
Our Bad Media closes its report by blasting CNN, Time and The Washington Post:
These examples raise far more serious questions about the integrity of Zakaria’s editors at CNN, TIME, and the Washington Post, all of whom claimed to have conducted … reviews and found nothing. In the light of our findings, we have to call bullshit. It took less than an hour and a few Google searches for us at Our Bad Media to find an example of lifting in Zakaria’s columns written before the 2012 plagiarism scandal. So we’re left to wonder: did TIME, CNN, or the Washington Post actually conduct good faith reviews of Zakaria’s work? Have they since?
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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